Reconceptualizing the Firm in a World of Outsourcing and Offshoring: The Organizational and Geographical Relocation of High‐Value Company Functions

In the largest sense, global strategy amounts to (1) the optimal disaggregation or slicing of the firm's value chain into as many constituent pieces as organizationally and economically feasible, followed by (2) decisions as how each slice should be allocated geographically (‘offshoring’) and organizationally (‘outsourcing’). Offshoring and outsourcing are treated as strategies that need to be simultaneously analysed, where just ‘core’ segments...